A bird is a machine working according to mathematical laws. It lies within the power of man to reproduce this machine with all its motions, but not with as much power… Such a machine constructed by man lacks only the spirit of the bird, and this spirit must be counterfeited by the spirit of man.
Codex Atlanticus, fol. 161r-a
In 1505 Leonardo was dreaming once more of the possibilities of human flight, and was filling a small notebook with notes and diagrams and light airy scribbles which comprise his most focused and purposive text on the subject. After a chequered history, in which the kleptomanic Count Libri plays a part, this notebook has come to rest in the Royal Library in Turin, and is known as the Turin Codex. It contains that famous fairground-barker proclamation, found on two separate pages in slightly different phrasing, which announces, ‘The big bird will take its first flight above the back of the Great Cecero, filling the universe with amazement, filling all the chronicles with its fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest where it was born.’146 The ‘big bird’ is certainly Leonardo’s flying-machine. Neat, highly specific drawings show parts of it (rotating wing-joints on folios 16–17, for example) but no full view – perhaps for reasons of secrecy.
The announcement seems to mean that he was planning a trial flight of the machine from the summit of Monte Ceceri, near Fiesole, just north of Florence. He spells it ‘Cecero’, which is an old Florentine word for a swan – a conjunction of meanings that would be congenial to Leonardo: a good omen, an emblematic connection. A jotting dated 14 March 1505 finds him sky-gazing on the road to Fiesole: ‘the cortone, a bird of prey which I saw going to Fiesole, above the place of the Barbiga’.147 This adds a touch of specificity to the possible flight of the ‘big bird’, but it is curious that there is no independent record of this momentous event, no letter-writer or diarist who mentions it: either it was a well-kept secret or it never happened.
Girolamo Cardano states in his De subtilitate (1550) that Leonardo was an ‘extraordinary man’ who tried to fly ‘but in vain’ – ‘tentavit et frustra’. If he – or someone: Zoroastro? – tried to fly from Monte Ceceri in early 1505 we must assume the trial was a failure, in which context one reads with some trepidation the page of the Turin Codex entitled ‘Per fugire il pericolo della ruina’ – ‘To escape the perils of destruction’:
The destruction of such a machine may occur in two ways. The first is that the machine might break up. The second would be if the machine turned on its side, or nearly on its side, because it should always descend at a very oblique angle, and almost exactly balanced on its centre. To prevent breaking up, the machine should be made as strong as possible in whichever part it may tend to turn over… Its parts must have great resistance so they can safely withstand the fury and impetus of the descent by the means I have mentioned: joints of strong leather treated with alum, the rigging made of cords of the strongest silk. And let no man encumber himself with iron bands, which are very soon broken when twisted.148
In these details one has a physical sense of this creature, this mathematical bird-machine: the creaking of the leather, the wind in the rigging, the ‘fury’ of the descent. One recalls that one of his earliest texts on the possibility of flight – ‘A man with wings large enough, and duly attached, might learn to overcome the resistance of the air…’ – is accompanied by his specifications for a parachute.
More than a study of the flying-machine, the Turin Codex is a study of its primary model: the bird. The pages are full of observations on the aerodynamics and physiology of birds, and of beautiful little sketches, squiggled yet acute, which swoop and soar and turn and flutter across its pages: ornithological pictograms. This notebook is a Leonardo poem on the subject of birds and their flight, and it is indeed around this time that he writes the famous marginal note about the kite, beginning: ‘Writing like this so particularly about the kite seems to be my destiny.’
The birds of the Turin Codex, the marginalium about the kite, the trial flight from Swan Mountain – all these seem to merge into the strange elusive talisman of Leonardo’s Leda and the Swan. It is elusive to the point of non-existence: there is no painting that can be thus described. It is one of those mysteriously notional Leonardo works which exist only before and after – in various preparatory sketches which are certainly in his hand, and in various finished paintings which are certainly not. Some of the paintings are of very high quality and may have been painted under his supervision; close similarities between them suggest they are based on a lost original, though whether this original was an actual painting or a full-size cartoon is uncertain. The Anonimo Gaddiano included ‘una Leda’ in a list of Leonardo’s paintings, but he (or someone else) later crossed the words through. Vasari did not mention the painting at all. G. P. Lomazzo certainly believed there was an authentic Leonardo Leda around – in fact he says that ‘la Leda ignuda’ (‘the nude Leda’) was one of the few paintings which Leonardo actually finished – but one can never be quite sure with Lomazzo, and he may in fact be talking about one of the extant studio versions or copies. There was once a Leda attributed to Leonardo in the French royal collection, but it disappears from the inventories in the late seventeenth century. According to tradition it was removed, on the grounds of immorality, by Madame de Maintenon.
The paintings – Leonardo’s, if it ever existed, and the copies and studio versions – belong to a later period, but the idea certainly originated at this time. The earliest studies are on a sheet which also contains a drawing of a horse for the Battle of Anghiari and is therefore datable to c. 1504.149 There is no swan, but the presence of the hatching babies can be discerned among the squiggles. These sketches evolve into two more finished drawings – one in the Duke of Devonshire’s collection at Chatsworth, the other in the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam – in which all the mythological elements are in place: the attentive swan, the fleshy innamorata, the hatchling children, the fecund vegetation. The style of the drawings reflects the influence of Michelangelo at this time – especially the Chatsworth drawing, with its strange whorled hatching and the statuesque heftiness of the female figure.
The Chatsworth drawing of Leda and the Swan, c. 1504–6.
In all these Leda is shown kneeling (the Leda inginocchiata) in a pose reminiscent of classical sculptures of Venus. This is perhaps the earlier conception, though the standing Leda (the Leda stante) who appears so uniformly in the painted versions also dates back to this time. There is no extant drawing of this pose comparable to the Chatsworth and Rotterdam drawings, but there is a small sketch on a sheet in Turin which once again has sketches relating to the Anghiari fresco. A lost cartoon of the standing Leda was copied by Raphael, probably during his Florentine sojourn of 1505–6, when he seems to have had contact with Leonardo and produced his portrait of Maddalena Doni, which shows familiarity with the Mona Lisa. This Leda cartoon was later owned by Pompeo Leoni, as appears from an inventory of his estate, dated 1614, which includes a ‘cartoon 2 braccia high’ – thus a full-scale cartoon – ‘of a Leda standing, and a swan who sports with her, emerging from a marsh with certain cupids in the grass’.150 Apart from the misinterpreting of the children as cupids, this is a clear sighting of the lost cartoon.
It is not known who, if anyone, commissioned the painting. It is possible the idea flickers into being as a composition for Isabella d’Este’s studiolo: it inhabits the same sort of classical-mythological world as paintings commissioned by the Marchioness from Mantegna and Perugino. Or it may have had a Florentine patron – the rich banker Antonio Segni, perhaps: a ‘friend’ (according to Vasari) and a classical enthusiast, for whom Leonardo did a superb drawing of Neptune in his chariot.151 Also part of Leonardo’s classical tendency at this time is a fugitive painting of Bacchus, about which there is an exchange of letters in April 1505 between Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara – the brother of Isabella – and one of his business agents. The Duke is anxious to purchase the painting, but learns that it has already been promised to Georges d’Amboise, Cardinal of Rouen. The painting is also mentioned in a Latin poem by an anonymous Ferrarese author, possibly Flavio Antonio Giraldi. The references suggest it was an existent work rather than just an idea; I will look later at some possible traces of it.152
The classical myth of Jupiter copulating in the guise of a swan with the beautiful princess Leda – one of Jupiter’s many divine ‘interventions’ of this sort – was certainly well known. Among classical sculptures there are some highly erotic renditions, with the swan between her legs in species-defying coitus. Leonardo’s painting was perhaps seen as risqué, but its dominant motif is not so much erotic as generative. The myth becomes one of fecundity and fertility. The woman is rounded, full-hipped – both consort and mother. Around her spring phallic reeds and rampant flowers; beside her stands the superphallic swan-god. Everything burgeons.
The Platonists would interpret the legend of Jupiter and Leda as an allegory of the influx of divine spirit into the terrestrial world. This seems to link the painting with Leonardo’s comment about human flight, quoted at the top of this chapter, in which he expresses his desire to instil into a man the one thing his aviational technology cannot supply – ‘the spirit of the bird’. This text is from around 1505, contemporary with the first drawings on the Leda theme. It was at this time too that he recorded that childhood memory of the kite which ‘came’ to him in his cradle: that strange transaction of the bird putting its tail in his mouth seems to enact once more, in a more personal arena of recovered or invented memory, this idea of receiving ‘the spirit of the bird’, the shamanistic secret of flight.
A page of the Turin Codex seems to sum up this intensely personal involvement in the idea of flight. As he writes his notes on the page, accompanied by the typical bird-sketches, the subject of his sentences changes from ‘the bird’ (‘If the bird wishes to turn quickly…’ etc.) to ‘you’, and the indeterminate ‘you’ of Leonardo’s notebooks, the imagined auditor of his thoughts and observations, is always essentially Leonardo himself. He is, in his imagination, already up there:
If the north wind is blowing and you are gliding above the wind, and if in your straight ascent upward that wind is threatening to overturn you, then you are free to bend your right or left wing, and with the inside wing lowered you will continue a curving motion…
In a text in the margin the two subjects merge almost seamlessly:
The bird that mounts upward always has its wings above the wind, and does not beat them, and moves in a circular motion. And if you want to go westward without beating your wings, and the wind is in the north, make the incident movement straight and below the wind, and the reflex movement above the wind.153
These are almost literally ‘flights of the mind’: in his mind, in his words, he is flying. And on this page of notes, actually staring out from behind the text – that is, already on the page when Leonardo wrote it – is a faint red-chalk drawing of a man’s head. It is hard to make out, hard to detach from the lines of handwriting superimposed on it, but it is a strong face, long-nosed, with a familiar hint of long hair falling, and it seems to me very likely that it is a portrait of Leonardo by one of his pupils. It would be our only image of him during these years of greatness – the years of the Mona Lisa and Anghiari and Leda, of Borgia and Machiavelli and Michelangelo. The drawing must be from about 1505 – the two dated notes in the codex are March and April 1505. It would show him at the age of fifty-three, and for the first time he is bearded. It is an elusive image, as ever: a shadowy face half-obscured by a sentence about wings ‘suprando la resistentia dellaria’ – ‘conquering the resistance of the air’.
This conquest of the air is always seen as the ultimate expression of Leonardo as aspirant Renaissance man, but these flights of which he dreams are not entirely distinct from those more prosaic flights with which the rest of us are familiar: flights of escape, of evasion, of irresolution – flights semantically referrable to fleeing rather than flying. Twenty years earlier, beneath a drawing of a bat, he wrote, ‘animal which flees from one element to another’. In his obsession with flight there is a kind of existential restlessness, a desire to float free from his life of tensions and rivalries, from the dictates of warmongers and art-lovers and contract-wavers. He yearns for this great escape, and in failing he feels himself more captive.